Computing to Go

The New York Times ran an article in their Technology section yesterday, describing how supercomputers are now commonly fabricated using packages of off-the-shelf CPUs, as opposed to custom designing a high-octane processing system from scratch.  The architecture is still specialized, but the processors used in the designs aren't.  The products from Intel and AMD have brought the impact of Moore's Law into the land of complex modeling and predictive computation on a relative shoestring.  Hooray for the geeks.

Deeper in, the article mentions the often-superior performance of graphics chips in high-speed computing, and here we find a bomb attached to the factoid:

"For example, the Chinese National University of Defense Technology has built the world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer using a mix of Intel’s Xeon chips and A.M.D.’s graphics chips."

Hello?  China .... Defense Technology .... Intel .... A.M.D.?  Read another couple of paragraphs from the same article:

"Countries like China that lack homegrown supercomputing technology can now buy their way into the realm of the computing elite. And Mr. Conway said leaders in China had committed themselves to creating a large network of supercomputers that should rival or surpass any similar set-up in the United States or Europe.

These machines will help fuel China’s oil and gas, military, and science aspirations."

In light of this revelation, the U.S. State Department needs to answer some questions -- What in the hell happened to ITAR?  Wasn't the International Trade in Arms Restrictions supposed to prevent wholesale transfers of critical war technologies to potential adversaries?  Are we suddenly of the opinion, sixty years after Mao Zedong conquered the mainland in the name of Marxist Socialism, that China the country is less of a danger to us?

Before anybody chimes back with the argument that today's China is a much more open society, allow one to point out that any perceived openness is not political and certainly not military in nature.  International trade aside, the Chinese governmental tenets and political philosophies are nearly identical to those established by Mao.  Only now, students are domestic enemies and the method of cross-border influence peddling employs stacks of money, rather than rifles and quotes from the Little Red Book.  Communist theology shelved for the moment does not equate with its eradication, or even its fall into internal disrepute.  The grand bases of the People's Republic lay buried in the woods, awaiting a more favorable environment in which to reconstitute.

It seems bizarre to expend our nation's wealth on technology development for the benefit of a country that appears to represent the greatest impending threat to our existence since World War II.  Especially when the safeguards in place should have prevented us from making the mistake.  More bizarre is the relative lack of any published concern, which demonstrates the degree of influence those stacks of cash deliver.

Sure, those processors are commodity items now, but there was a time when sending a Pong video game to Beijing represented a serious trade violation.  Have world conditions changed that dramatically?  I doubt it.  You may not understand the full impact of this now, but we all will eventually.  Remember where you heard it, because I may not be around to grab the credit, counted among the first to face the firing squad when the truth emerges.